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Artemis II's toilet is a moon mission milestone

scientificamerican.com

131–140 of 183 posts

Re: Artemis II's toilet is a moon mission milestone

#131
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The second law of thermodynamics dictates that everything poops. Anything alive that is using energy and doing work and transforming matter must poop in some form or another. We don’t know what form life out there might take, but we know it poops. Even post biological machine life would poop in the form of industrial waste, waste heat, etc. Even near perfect recycling can only be near perfect, not perfect, due to the…

can't you have life that dies before it poops? "death before dishonor" xD

In that case the corpse is the poop. There are insects whose adult stages do this.

Re: Artemis II's toilet is a moon mission milestone

#132

I just tuned into the NASA live stream after this and the first, and only, thing I've heard is "we've had a successful ejection. toilet is go for use"

A thought: is the ejected space poop going to continue to travel in space at 15000km/h and eventually drop into the sun, or will it also be captured by gravity and land on the moon?

Urine is ejected, solids are collected and returned to earth.

Re: Artemis II's toilet is a moon mission milestone

#133
post #94
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had the same realization lately. Shouldn't it be said more specifically that anything that consumes matter to turn it into energy (as all living things on Earth) must poop? If we make the distinction between mass and energy of course.

No I think that "everything poops" is absolutely perfect. Poop is entropy, and everything turns into entropy eventually. It might not be traditional poop as we know it, but the point is, no matter how far we go one day, no matter what/who we meet out there, no matter how much we advance, there will always be waste to manage . Waste might be literal poop, waste heat, spent uranium, used oil, slag from a smelter or wha…

Years ago I read about an actual scientific proposal to look for UFOs. A few people in the UFO scene with scientific backgrounds were trying to crowdfund it.

The idea was to place very sensitive wide angle infrared telescopes at remote locations that are UFO sighting hot spots. Because as long as physics is universal anything flying around, especially like supposed alien craft, must be using a lot of power and rejecting tons of waste heat. They’d have to light up very bright in IR and physics says there’s nothing you can do about it (unless you imagine wild ideas like dumping it into another multiverse slice).

You’d get lots of planes but you could cross reference against public data to remove most of those. And obviously something doing maneuvers that are aerodynamically impossible or would turn a human into strawberry jam is not a plane.

I thought it was a good idea but I don’t think it got funded. It was years ago so the tech might have been very expensive. I bet it would be cheaper now. IMO it would be a good low cost but high payoff experiment.

Re: Artemis II's toilet is a moon mission milestone

#134
post #81

Uh oh, that toilet looks pretty heavy, how much does that thing weigh? Will the extra weight be worth it during reentry? Or will the crew push the whole thing out the airlock on the way home? I wondered why the Artemis crew module weighs twice as much as the Apollo module after 60 years of scientific progress and developments in materials science and aerospace engineering, now I am starting to understand. Plastic bag…

Correct me if I'm mistaken, but weren't pencils ruled out by NASA because of the dust they create when they write? The toilet engineering could be a similar situation. These people are professionals, we should not assume they built it like this for no reason.

My secondary school physics teacher was somewhat accommodating to "interesting" experiments - those which might look cool to teenagers whilst also providing a lesson in physics.

One of those was attaching electrical probes to each end of a pencil, and applying an electrical current. Graphite conducts extremely well: the pencil "lead" (actually graphite) heats up, glowing a bright orange colour, whilst setting fire to the wooden pencil surrounds. If you snap the graphite "lead", you can touch the two ends together causing a bright electrical arc.

It's a great physics demonstration, and graphite conductivity is the reason pencils aren't used in zero-gravity environments.

Re: Artemis II's toilet is a moon mission milestone

#135
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you sure? I wouldn't have thought the skills would be transferable. I don't mean to judge, but I think if your toilet needs heat shield engineers, maybe you should see your doctor.

Grandparent comment was being sarcastic

Wow I'm just learning so much today. First I learned that heat shield engineers can work on space toilets, now someone is teaching me about sarcasm. It's great how everyone here on HN is so dedicated to teaching me things.

Re: Artemis II's toilet is a moon mission milestone

#136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps nurses would be a better pool of astronaut candidates than test pilots. I remember seeing a Russian space toilet when they had it set up in the powerhouse museum in Sydney. It looked like a booth with a vaguely pubic area shaped vacuum attachment designed to be unisex. I stared at it for some time trying to work out how it worked. The Apollo system seems horrendous!

Honestly replacing gravity with negative air pressure might have been the ideal solution But I know that air is also a limited resource on space so it can't be solely an "airline-like system" (Also discarding it "outdoors" might be the best solution in the end)

Space debris would have an additional meaning.

Re: Artemis II's toilet is a moon mission milestone

#138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having an repulsion for shit is a healthy adaptation. But it seems that for some people they're much more sensitive. Similarly, it's probably useful for a primitive person to vomit on sight of a familiar person vomiting, collective protection. Definitely a trait to find out before going to space!

The one I've never got is how so many people faint or become I'll when they see blood. Always seemed like a massive maladaptive that should create even more risk in a presumably dangerous situation. If a tiger attacks me in the night and the guy next to me faints because I'm getting eaten, we'll both end up dying.

It seems maladaptive. I faint (sometimes) at the sight of my own blood, and must look away when nurses draw it. I also get queasy when even talking about blood or reading about it. I can't think of any good reason this would be helpful; in fact keeping my cool would be advantageous.

And yes, I do have a very vivid imagination.

Re: Artemis II's toilet is a moon mission milestone

#139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Seems like a big issue is I'm guessing insistence on having this be a solo operation for cultural reasons. I had to do some stool collection and it took every ounce of willpower and a N95 mask to prevent me from vomiting everywhere. And that was my poop. I think it's more than cultural, there's a strong visceral reaction. On the other hand, I can pickup my dog's poop no problem. Nurses are heroes.

But parents do that all the time with babies. It is disgusting (I hated doing it) but you get somewhat used to it relatively quickly.

We seem to make a disconnect with our own children. I certainly did. But it doesn't extend to even other people's kids!

Re: Artemis II's toilet is a moon mission milestone

#140
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve always wanted to be an astronaut, but yeah… pass. Weird a silicon-like pants that strapped up so there was no leaks (like fisherman’s pants), that has a vacuum you attach (almost catheter style) isn’t used. Actually now that I think about it, it’s weird that astronauts aren’t using catheters 24/7!

I mean this has also been a problem for fighter pilots as well. The "piddle packs" for F-16 pilots are implicared at least one crash due to the complexity of using them. [1] https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-03-23-me-542-st...

Forget about pee, I always wondered about fighter pilots in one of those long, multi-hour flights, what happens if they really need to go number 2? I suppose they self-select as people without this kind of problems, but it can happen to anyone really.

I suppose in an emergency they just shit their pants, but I wonder what the ground crew says when they touch down.

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